Basketball

I did play sports, for a time. Mostly basketball, though I don’t even really know why that sport was the one I ended up on. I never had much affinity for it as a kid, never watching the games on tv, even though Portland of course is a basketball town through and through. I did “Mini-Hoopers” from first grade to third, when I got bummed out because they started keeping score and I realized that the team I was on pretty much always lost.

I was happy in the suburbs of Portland. I visited once as an adult with a friend of mine, an ex, and she said the neighborhood I grew up in looked like something out of a fairy tale, rich with trees and gardens and two story houses (she had grown up in a small single story house in Missouri.) How could you ever leave, she said. I didn’t want to, I said.

But in 8th grade I found myself rudely thrust from my life as my family relocated to a small town in the southern Willamette Valley, about 20 miles east of Corvallis, a sleepy little one Walmart town called Lebanon, though really, we weren’t in Lebanon proper, but bought a house just outside of the even smaller towns of Sodaville and Waterloo (no Walmarts in either of these, though Waterloo had a little general store that I think sold a bit of glassware as well). Since we were out in the country, I ended up at the country school, where my dad had gotten a job as a school counselor. My dad had never really liked the wealthy suburbs of West Linn with their snooty attitudes and nice cars and “polite” prejudices behind closed doors, he having grown up in a small town in Idaho (working at the hardware store every summer), and his job at the high school seemed to diminish him every year, so eventually he made the jump to this little shitbird town. To the good country life, to that American life, with its meth and its child molesters and its on the face racism, (not like the closet racism of white white suburbia but the racism of white white white small town America white hood white cross white fucking fire and the cross turns black black black^[1]). I was uncomfortable from the start, though the first thing that made me uncomfortable, to be frank, was that half the kids seemed to talk exclusively in Austin Powers quotes. They all knew each other, played sports together for years.

The kids at Oak Hill could be roughly divided into two categories, those being sports kids (who all played on the football team in the fall, switched to basketball in the winter, and then a few of them did track in the spring). And then there were the dirtbags, the burnouts, the stoners; these kids didn’t play any sports at all with the exception of this one girl who boxed. I didn’t have too much interest in the guys in this cohort, who seemed kind of dense (I was still scared of drugs, too scared to try them not that anyone was offering, though less so all the time), but I found the girls in this circle sort of fascinating, certainly more intriguing than the jocks female alter egos, a litany of “Jordans”^[2].

There were also a few outliers, nerdy kids; a girl who’d been homeschooled, a real tiny girl who other kids said smelled like fish^[3], a nerdy Christian guy who kept trying to debate the existence of God with me (I maintained, he wun’t real).

I really didn’t fit in with any of these groups. I’ve never really gotten on with the nerdy kids who always seem a little too content to sit in the boxes they collectively build; obviously I wasn’t baaaad enough for the stoners. Really, I always just wanted to be Bugs Bunny (or Archie Goodwin from the Nero Wolfe tv show that I would sometimes watch with my folks) - quick witted, adaptable, wisecracking. In reality, I’m far too nervous and twitchy of a person to pull THAT off, but it resembles my inner self image much more closely than, say, Napoleon Dynamite or whatever other geek dick people occasionally tried to foist upon me.

All that to say, almost by default I ended up hanging out with the jocks. And thus…. sports. For the first few weeks, they played football during recess, and I knew I had no business doing THAT, but before too long they switched to basketball, playing on an outside court with this tiny hoop, probably six feet or so, small enough that a lot of the kids could dunk on it and, tired of essentially roaming the school ground aimlessly during the lunch hour, I found myself joining in the games. Rarely did I find myself getting the ball, but I would dutifully stand in the appropriate places that I was expected to. I remember one of the great honors of those recess games was knocking the ball out of someone's hand when they were trying to shoot, "stuffing them." Whenever this happened, the kids would yell out "STUFF" at the top of their lungs, in gleeful celebration of someone getting their shit ruined.

This was CERTAINLY as far as I was going to take it, but then one day after gym class, the basketball coach (who was also our gym teacher^[4]) told all the kids who were going to be playing that year to stay behind for a sec, and I tried to dip out but all those kids I’d been playing pick-up yelled, “Chris, get back here!” And so I found myself, essentially being shanghaied into playing for the team that year.

To mark the occasion, my parents bought me new shoes. They weren’t too fancy and had no doubt come off the discount shelf at a Big 5. Still, I liked the feel of them, the grip they had on the smooth hardwood floor of the gym. After I got them, I shot some baskets on the hoop that was outside of our house. For some reason, my parents always bought houses that had basketball hoops on them, as if that was a crucial part of the American dream alongside “picket fence” and "symmetrically cut lawn.” I had used to shoot hoops when I was younger, but mostly I had liked to pretend that I was playing against a variety of cartoonish villains, eschewing both the rules of the games and the laws of physics in my imaginings. My technique hadn’t advanced much since then. Still, I thought, feeling the way the new shoes gripped the concrete and flexed in sync with my motions, maybe I can actually do this.

There was an A team and a B team, and though I was firmly B team material, because of the relatively small number of players at our school, I was put on both - a starter for the B team, and a swing on the A team. This mostly meant riding the bench during the A games. To make matters more complicated, we also did not have enough members to have segregated 7th and 8th grade teams, so both teams were a combination of 7th and 8th graders. For the first half of the season we played against the 8th grade teams, then we swapped and played against the 7th graders. This meant that every game we played was lopsided as all hell. The B team always did pretty well, since we had players who had “swung down” ( A team players who played on the B team too) as well as swung up (me, mostly). The A team, however, being how it was shored up with 7th graders, and not having that big of a talent pool to draw on anyways, always lost to the 8th graders, and always completely dominated the 7th graders, to the point that I don’t think anyone really gave a shit about those latter games.

No friend, there was only one game that mattered, and that was the A team against the 8th graders.

It's funny, I remember very little about those B games that I actually played in. I think I even occasionally scored a basket, but mostly I was a “defense guy.” “Chris, he’s really good at defense, he really gets in there,” said Coach Daniels, which I now take to mean that I basically sucked at everything related to holding the ball or dribbling or passing or shooting, but that I was willing to stand there in front of someone and wave my arms in the air. In the B team this was generally good enough; the few times I played an A game, I imagine the opposing players mostly just walked right past me at their leisure.

But despite not really playing, God do I remember those A games. I remember one team, Cascade, towering over us like giants, Laestrygonians in sneakers and polyester shorts. I mentioned it to my dad years later, he said a lot of those kids went on to the state championship. Fair enough, but it's a bitter pill being on the jagged edge of destiny.

So we lost. Over and over again, games that seemed to stretch on forever, knock-downs and drag-outs in middle school gymnasiums across the valley, wanting to win so badly we could fucking taste it, mouths full of ashes at the end.

I wanted to win too, which came as something of a shock when a month earlier I couldn’t have given a shit about basketball and was trying to actively avoid it. But I would sit there on the bench, terrified the whole time of the dim possibility that I myself might actually be called on to go and play, and watch these kids, a few weeks prior the often racist, small-minded, no doubt future Trump voting small town peckerwood jocks, now my comrades and compatriots, my team, would run themselves raw across the gymnasium, and you could almost see it turning the other way every time. Maybe that was the worst. It was watching David and Goliath over and over again, but every time Goliath just beats the shit out of David.

But no one wanted to win as badly as our point guard, Chris N. He wanted to win so bad it was like it was causing him physical pain, like an artist cursed with never being able to manifest the things he could see into material reality. He could see it, victory, so clearly in front of him, he could grasp at it, brush the edges with the tips of his fingers. But he couldn’t actually do it, and it was unhinging him. He’d get this intense look on his face; his eyes would narrow and his jaw would clench like he was about to get into a bar fight. “Come on!” he would yell at the players on the other team, eyes wild and veins bulging. Even though we were losing, it was like he was daring them to try to be better than him. When he had the ball, he would dribble it under his legs in a single fluid motion, then drive for the basket, as effortless and impressive an athletic feat as I have ever seen.

It didn’t ever work though. We still lost every single one of those 8th grade A games.

I remember one of the few times I ended up playing in an A game. Usually when they let the bench players in, it was because we were losing so bad it didn’t really matter if us humps came in and fucked around. Most of the time, the games were close though, so they kept the front line in, sometimes kids playing the whole game, pushing through their sweat and exhaustion until finally getting to collapse at the end in merciful defeat. In this game, we were trailing but still in it, but they let me in anyway for some reason. We were down in the enemy’s turf, and Chris got a rebound, scanned for an open guy, which in this case happened to be me, trying to be good defense (waving my hands around), and so he passed me the ball, which miraculously did not bounce off of my face and break my nose, but which instead I caught. I caught that motherfucker clean.

And froze. I had no idea what to do with it. I’m sure it was only a few milli-seconds, but it was long enough, me standing there, the ball in my hands, an expression of, I imagine, profound shock on my face. One of the players from the other team promptly plucked the ball from my hands, as easily as plucking a dandelion. I will never forget the look of dismay on Chris N’s face.

One more memory of basketball. Playing during lunch hour on that little court. Chris coming driving up the court, gearing up for a dunk, ball in his hand outstretched behind him, glorious in a natural athleticism that I will never know, a moment frozen in the embers of time, 14 going on forever, and then, impulsively, on pure instinct, I reached out and swatted the ball out of his hand. The look on his face changing in slow motion from ecstatic victory to dazzling frustration. The ball went bouncing down the court, everyone yelling now.

I stuffed the shit out of that fucker.